Scott Foundas

An appreciably moody but dramatically stilted crime drama that exudes a certain retro appeal before collapsing into a series of empty neo-noir poses.

A colossally overproduced white elephant of a movie that obfuscates both its own protagonist and his important message with layer upon layer of unnecessary “style.”

The Runner doesn’t lack for drama, but the characters are so thinly and predictably drawn, and the movie’s supposed insights into the art of political compromise so banal, that nothing catches fire.

Even the resourceful, likable Reynolds is at a loss to elevate this rather dreary piece of would-be escapism, which calls out for the wry, pulpy touch of a John Carpenter (or his acolyte David Twohy) and instead gets the strained self-seriousness of director Tarsem Singh.

If you haven’t come to see lots (and lots) of dance, you’ve come to the wrong place; and even if nothing in the second half of ABCD 2 quite reaches “Happy Hour” levels, D’Souza shoots and edits dance with a lot more savoir faire than most contemporary musical directors, mindful to keep the dancers’ entire bodies in frame, and cutting with a strong sense of spatial continuity.

It’s fun enough while it lasts, but somehow, finally, all too much and not enough. The problem isn’t that dinosaurs have ceased to impress us, but that dinosaurs alone are not enough to sustain us

Whereas Wan (who retains a producer credit here, and makes a cameo appearance) is the sort of director who can effortlessly turn a billowing curtain or creaking floorboard into an unbearable portent of dread, Whannell rarely makes the neck hairs quiver, let alone stand at attention.

Desert Dancer traffics in the kind of spirited rebel-youth archetypes who’ve been endemic to dance movies for decades.

Zombeavers is not a total wash, and seen at night, under the right combination of low expectations and controlled substances, it may even seem better than it really is.

Beneath the sitcom cutesiness and boldfaced sentimentality, the film manages to keep just enough reality coursing through to stay grounded.

Z for Zachariah is a handsome-looking film (shot in widescreen, on remote New Zealand locations, by veteran David Gordon Green d.p. Tim Orr) and it doesn’t lack for provocative ideas, though it never digs quite deep enough into any of them.

As usual, Statham gets a lot of mileage out of his droll, ever-present scowl, but as in “Heat,” the movie’s disparate narrative strands never really come together, and the climactic showdown feels pretty anticlimactic.

A handsomely made but dramatically inert and not very scary sequel.

Features a standout central performance by newcomer Boyd Holbrook (“The Host”), but suffers from predictable plotting and shallow characterizations that keep the movie from ever transcending the obvious.

When it comes to Annabelle’s five or six big stinger moments, Leonetti manages to deliver the jolts, and if audiences are sure to head home complaining about how dumb and predictable it all was, many may also find themselves nursing their significant others’ lightly bruised forearms.

Touches of apocalyptic comedy run throughout Nightcrawler, but the movie’s overriding tone is one of strident, finger-wagging self-seriousness.

The good news is that Kevin Costner does some of the finest, most deeply felt work of his career as a widower lawyer fighting for custody of his biracial granddaughter in Mike Binder’s Black and White. The bad news is that this well-intentioned family drama never quite shakes free from its didactic, movie-of-the-week dramaturgy and a hand-holding approach to race-relations.

If the movie never quite masters the feel of messy, grown-up life, it at least makes a few promising salvos in that direction... The actors help a lot.

Ponderously overlong and not even half as much fun as it should have been, The Equalizer still gets a lot of mileage out of Washington’s unassailable star presence.

An inspirational sports drama that goes long on rectitudinous sermonizing but comes up short on gridiron thrills or genuine love for the game.

The Giver reaches the screen in a version that captures the essence of Lowry’s affecting allegory but little of its mythic pull.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is at once too much and yet somehow not enough. On the one hand, it’s exciting to see the always envelope-pushing Lee working without a studio- or distributor-imposed safety net... But while the film never lacks for ambition, it fails to satisfy emotionally or intellectually in the ways Lee intends.

Skillfully made first feature by writer-director Katrin Gebbe has some undeniably striking passages and performances, but ultimately spirals toward a gruesome third act that is no less monotonous for supposedly being based on true events.

Seth MacFarlane has delivered a flaccid all-star farce that’s handsomely dressed up with nowhere to go for most of its padded two-hour running time.

Both the words and the pictures are surprisingly flaccid, largely due to Gerald DiPego’s literate but hopelessly contrived screenplay and direction that lacks Schepisi’s usual snap.

The lively but wildly erratic result will surely please Jaglom’s winnowing fan base, while baffling most others and doing little to deter Jaglom himself.

There are intriguing, half-formed ideas afoot in Transcendence, but the script and Pfister’s heavy, humorless direction tend to reduce everything to simplistic standoffs between good and evil.

For all its sincere intentions, Kruishoop’s script feels cobbled together from newspaper headlines and bits of other movies rather than real, lived experience.

The rest of Sabotage rarely rises to Schwarzenegger’s level, in large measure because the other characters (of which there are far too many) aren’t nearly as sharply drawn by Ayer and co-writer Skip Woods.

One of the best products to roll off the prolific multihyphenate’s Atlanta-based assembly line, largely absent the pandering humor and finger-wagging moralism that have bedeviled many of Perry’s earlier (if undeniably popular) efforts.

Paul plays the part with the flinty, tightly wound charisma of a small man who makes up in moxie what he lacks in stature. There’s something of the young James Cagney in him, and he’s by far the best thing Need for Speed has going for it.

Even in the movie’s most ridiculous moments, Collet-Serra keeps the pacing brisk and knows how to divert our attention with a well-timed bit of comic relief.

It’s a familiar story of music-world success, failure and addiction, admirably but unevenly told by first-time feature director Jeff Preiss, who certainly knows the music and the milieu, but proves less adept at shaping the material into a consistently compelling narrative.

An unremarkable but entirely serviceable action quickie.

A lazy and listless buddy-cop action-comedy that fades from memory as quickly as its generic title.

For all its failings, there is one thing about “Long Walk to Freedom” that can’t be denied: Idris Elba gives a towering performance, a Mandela for the ages.

Last Love sticks to a flaccid middle ground lacking any real drama or pathos.

A smattering of funny gags and the nostalgia value of the cast — none of whom, curiously, have ever shared the screen before — keeps the whole thing more watchable than it has any right to be.

What keeps One Chance plugging along almost in spite of itself are the warmly engaging performances of Corden and Alexandra Roach.

Winning performances by a number of fresh-faced newcomers are almost but not quite enough to recommend The Secret Lives of Dorks, a fitfully amusing, more often shrill and overstated teen comedy that, like its dweeby protagonist, tries too hard to impress.

The movies by their very nature require a certain suspension of disbelief, but Mission Park requires more suspension than a two-ton crane could provide.

It speaks well of The Investigator that, for much of its running time, it’s possible to lose sight of the movie’s agenda and get caught up in its hokey machinations.

Glazer has always been longer on atmosphere and uncanny moods than on narrative, but the fatal flaw of Under the Skin isn’t that not much happens; it’s that what does happen isn’t all that interesting.

Devil’s Knot only occasionally feels weightier than a high-end Lifetime original or “Law & Order” episode.

There is something too dry and austere about Greengrass and Ray’s telescoped vision, which touches only fleetingly on the pirates’ motives, the suffering of the Somali people and the collateral damage of global capitalism.

It’s cheesy enough fun while it lasts, but in the Harlin pantheon, it isn’t a patch on “Deep Blue Sea.” Then again, few things are.

Hendrickson shot “Colossus” from a partial script, leaving room for improvisation, and the movie’s loose, shapeless feel and scenes that go on far too long are the telltale signs of a filmmaker who fell so in love with his own material that he couldn’t bring himself to kill his darlings.

Manages to get a fair bit right about early 1970s surf culture when it isn’t trafficking in the hoariest of David-vs.-Goliath cliches.

Pic’s monotone edges towards monotony by the end of the third act, but as no-budget calling-card features go, Frankenstein’s Army remains a grisly cut above.

Thank heavens — or at least the “Department of Eternal Affairs” — for Jeff Bridges, whose hilariously free-associative performance as a 19th-century frontier marshal-turned-21st-century undead lawman is like an adrenaline shot to the heart of R.I.P.D.

That sly toying with audience sympathies is, alas, all that’s notable about this otherwise poverty-row quickie produced for the Chiller cable network.

The humorless tone and relentlessly noisy (visually and sonically) aesthetics leave much to be desired.

This big-hearted underdog comedy from director Shawn Levy is, much like its two leads, exceedingly affable and good-natured despite being undeniably long in the tooth.

Thanks to some accomplished hocus pocus and an appealing cast, this would-be “Ocean’s Eleven” of the magic world remains watchable throughout, even as it plods along without ever quite fulfilling its potential.

Bruni Tedeschi holds all of pic’s myriad tangents in a delicate balance, no single one ever rising to the fore, no pressure felt to wrap everything — or anything — up in a tidy package at the end.

An accomplished but singularly unpleasant immersion in Mexico's vicious cycle of drug-fueled violence.

More often, Gatsby feels like a well-rehearsed classic in which the actors say their lines ably, but with no discernible feeling behind them.

Iron Man 3 is more perfunctory and workmanlike than its two predecessors, but this solid production still delivers more than enough of what fans expect.

Bay can be a master of exuberant chaos, but here the violence mostly lands with a sickening thud, which is fitting, one supposes, but also ultimately numbing.

A relentlessly formulaic biopic that succeeds at transforming one of the most compelling sports narratives of the 20th century into a home run of hagiography.

The Place Beyond the Pines is a much bigger canvas, and scene by scene it can be riveting...But the disparate pieces never quite jell; the movie is all trees and no forest.

A Red Dawn for the Tea Party era, Olympus Has Fallen is pretty ridiculously entertaining—or at least entertainingly ridiculous—for long stretches, dulled only by the realization that there are many parts of the country where this will play as less than total farce.

Lipsky is clearly reaching for something grand and cosmic here, but the results are mostly just confounding.

Spottiswoode's lackluster film fails to offer any fresh perspective on these now well-known events.

The longer Swing Vote hangs around, the more engaging it becomes. It's twice as smart as you have any reason to expect but still only half as smart as you wish it were.

It's a feature-length teaser for a never-to-be sci-fi franchise.

This represents at least as much of an artistic setback for Smith as "Chasing Amy" and "Dogma" were advances.

Never quite realizes its potential to evoke the real horror of the Internet -- Yet, Malone has given the film a distinctive atmosphere and occasional flashes of his perverse sense of humor.

The movie cries out for the bawdy, rompy air that filled Richard Lester's "Three Musketeers" movies, and what it gets instead is the same dispassionate "professionalism" that has made Hallström a steady fixture in a Hollywood that could do with an infusion of Casanova's own virile lifeblood.

On a storytelling level, Robots is in dire need of an upgrade.

Jacobs and his writers are notably more interested in creepy atmosphere -- and in contemplating the order of the universe -- than in jump-in-your-seat jolts. But well before day breaks, it's the movie’s plot (which would have made for an outstanding Outer Limits episode) that has come to seem stuck in an endless loop.

Beyond that surface grit, Intermission is still a fairly saccharine collage of self-redemptive gestures and happy endings that, true to its title, only fitfully compels.

While the entertainment value of Cloverfield is highly negotiable, it's clear that Abrams has consciously aligned himself with those filmmakers who have used the template of a grade-B monster/invasion movie -- Don Siegel, George Romero, Steven Spielberg -- as a stealth vessel for social commentary.

An unusually bright, inspired look at the perils of breaking into the acting business.

Serviceable, wholly uninspired.

Pretty formulaic stuff: bland self-empowerment tinged with warm fuzzies in all the right places. But what makes this "Somebody" something is Pasquin's deft touch and understanding with the material.

By the time of its medical-operation climax, Stuck On You has focused so much on ennobling the disabled that it comes to resemble a segment of the Jerry Lewis telethon.

It's all fitfully amusing, thanks in large part to Bouchard's richly comic performance, but the movie is never very involving, and it overstays its welcome by a good, long while.

Watching the passionless Phantom, with its geriatric story-framing device, gooey dimestore romanticism and tawdry pop ballads about unrequited yearning, feels akin to dying and waking up in your parents’ easy-listening-radio hell.

It's rarely a good sign when a movie feels obliged to add the words "a fable" beneath its main title -- and Undertaking Betty is no exception.

Part dewey-eyed paperback romance, part acid-trip planetarium show, this extravagantly silly movie comes on like the second coming of "2001."

Southland Tales pilfers large chunks of its plot and visual style from Alex Cox’s "Repo Man," Kathryn Bigelow’s "Strange Days" and Shane Carruth’s Sundance-winning "Primer," and unlike the makers of those films, Kelly hasn’t digested his influences and made them his own -- he’s more like the slacker college kid who’s just enough of an intellectual poseur to bluff his way to an A. That said, Southland Tales isn’t entirely without its pleasures, chiefly The Rock.

Open Water is just one tedious scene stretched out to feature length. It's terrifying all right, but only for what it says about the extents to which a couple of hungry actors and a bullish director will go to turn themselves into overnight celebrities.

Tries to combine the suspense of old Saturday morning serials with the gusto of producer Jerry Bruckheimer's action pics. Falling short on both counts, this long, and long-winded, series of middling cliffhangers won't pump the adrenaline of action aficionados or -- the family crowd.

The Lives of Others wants us to see that the Stasi -- at least some of them -- were, like their Gestapo brethren, “just following orders." You can call that naive optimism on Donnersmarck's part, or historical revisionism of the sort duly lambasted by the current film version of Alan Bennett's "The History Boys." I, for one, tremble at the thought of what this young director does for an encore.

The picture shows vital signs only in a few scenes where Cedric takes on the additional role of his own lecherous uncle, but it's too little too late.

A cobwebbed, mummified horror entry that makes obvious, cartoonishly grotesque demands for attention.

Put simply, this second feature by the young Austrian director Hans Weingartner is a put-on -- a glib anti-capitalist rant in which the rhetoric rarely rises above the you-too-can-save-a-child-for-less-than-the-price-of-coffee level.

A scabrous, provocative and often funny social satire about the American dream, Spike Lee's flawed but fascinating She Hate Me addresses everything from corporate malfeasance to the African AIDS epidemic, barely catching its breath in-between.

A screwball road movie set in a middle-of-nowhere town, Kwik Stop suggests "It Happened One Night" as reimagined by David Lynch or Hal Hartley.

The Chorus is sham art and questionable entertainment, but at the very least it sends you whistling out of the theater.

McKinnon's direction is nothing if not atmospheric -- his best scenes unfold with a pungent languor that suggests the power of the backwoods to turn hours into days and days into years. If only the sum total were a movie more "In the Bedroom" than it is everything-but-the-kitchen-sink.

Welsh director Sara Sugarman and the great cinematographer Stephen Burum (Hoffa, The Untouchables) keep the visuals bouncing along in bright, primary-color-intensive fashion, but the movie has no real heart and even less soul.

After a lively first half-hour, the scenes start to feel heavy, as though Serrano suddenly decided he was actually making a meaningful drama, and the ensuing, halfhearted political satire is like an extra weight on top of that.

Though the story hardly lacks for event as it traces Khayyam's ascension from the peasantry to the royal court, the period costumes and sets look to be on loan from Medieval Times, as do most of the actors, and the boxy, harshly lit compositions make everything feel even more cardboard.

The vaporous Wonderland never moves beyond its grungily romanticized view of the past.

It's a rich idea for a comedy, even if the filmmakers seem timid about making the pic the full-on satire it might have been.

Assembled in a straightforward, television-style presentation that gets the better of it.